Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 12

In addition to being memory devices, landscapes and buildings are also amplifiers of emotions; they reinforce sensations of belonging or alienation, invitation or rejection, tranquillity or despair. A landscape or work of architecture cannot, however, create feelings. Through their authority and aura, they evoke and strengthen our own emotions and reflect them back to us as if these feelings of ours had an external source. In the Laurentian Library in Florence I confront my own sense of metaphysical melancholy awakened and reflected back by Michelangelo's architecture. The optimism that I experience when approaching the Paimio Sanatorium is my own sense of hope evoked and strengthened by Alvar Aalto's optimistic architecture. The hill of the meditation grove at the Forest Cemetery in Stockholm, for instance, evokes a state of longing and hope through an image that is an invitation and a promise. This architectural image of landscape simultaneously evokes remembrance and imagination as the composite painted image of Arnold Böcklin's ‘Island of Death’. All poetic images are condensations and microcosms.

‘House, even more than the landscape, is a psychic state’, Bachelard suggests.⁶ Indeed, writers, film directors, poets and painters do not just depict landscapes or houses as unavoidable geographic and physical settings of the events of their stories; they seek to express, evoke and amplify human emotions, mental states and memories through purposeful depictions of settings, both natural and man‐made. ‘Let us assume a wall: what takes place behind it?’, asks the poet Jean Tardieu,⁷ but we architects rarely bother to imagine what happens behind the walls we have erected. The walls conceived by architects are usually mere aestheticized constructions, and we see our craft in terms of designing aesthetic structures rather than evoking perceptions, feelings and fantasies.